Grape & Canister
Civil War News, Books, Videos, and an Otis pic
Movie Discussion: Later today I will send out an email with a zoom link to all paid subscribers for our discussion about the movie GETTYSBURG, which will take place tomorrow evening at 7PM EST. [Make sure to check your spam folder if you don’t see my email.] There is still time to upgrade if you would like to take part. To get things started, I am going to take a few minutes to share some thoughts about the movie, but after that the floor will be open for your comments and questions. Hope to see some of you.
News
Last month I joined my good friend Todd Groce for an interview with Emerging Civil War’s Chris Mackowski. We talked about James Longstreet and his place in what you might call “Confederate Cancel Culture.”
Speaking of James Longstreet, historian Eric Foner reviewed Elizabeth Varon’s new biography of the general at The Atlantic. I highly recommend the book.
Longstreet believed that peaceful and just reunion would be possible only when the white South moved beyond the myth of the Lost Cause. The end of his erasure from historical memory highlights what a long and complicated evolution that has proved to be. Perhaps his restoration is also a sign that the time has come to shift attention from taking down old monuments to erecting new ones, including some to the Black and white leaders of Reconstruction, who braved white-supremacist violence in an effort to bring into being the ‘new birth of freedom’ that Abraham Lincoln envisioned at Gettysburg.
As part of the promotional work for her new Longstreet biography, Elizabeth Varon explores whether the Insurrection Clause of the 14th Amendement should be used to prevent for President Donald Trump from running for president again.
The Republicans of the Reconstruction era would be shocked at our current state of affairs where Americans neither ask nor expect Trump’s repentance. If Section Three cannot stop a remorseless insurrectionist like Trump from seizing the reins of power, then it truly has been drained of whatever meaning and promise it might once have had.
I agree.
This is a fascinating story of how the daughter of former Mississippi governor Adelbert Ames challenged President John F. Kennedy to correct the portrayal of her Reconstruction ancestor in his Pulitzer-Prize winning book, Profiles in Courage, and in the process ended up writing her own biography in her 80s.
Borderland became Blanche’s archive and fortress while she spent six years—1957 to 1963—researching and writing. When her granddaughter Olivia Hoblitzelle visited Borderland, she marveled at the piles of Civil War maps and books in the library. On one trip, Hoblitzelle recalled, her father asked, “How long is it now?” “Five hundred pages,” Blanche replied. When Hoblitzelle’s father asked, “Isn’t that enough?,” Blanche “looked him straight in the eye, and said, ‘Well, if Tolstoy could do it, so can I.’ ” When she finished, she was 86 years old.
Blanche’s research drew significantly on the work of Black historians, who had been publishing trenchant studies of Reconstruction for decades. White historians had largely ignored this work, dismissing it as second-class scholarship. Blanche thought otherwise. Her bibliography cited W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America, Franklin’s The Militant South, John Lynch’s The Facts of Reconstruction, Merl Eppse’s The Negro, Too, in American History, and George Washington Williams’s History of the Negro Race in America. Kennedy, meanwhile, had not cited a single Black author on Mississippi Reconstruction.
This story was all new to me. If you are not subscribed to The Atlantic, this piece will be part of a special issue on Reconstruction that should his newsstands in the coming weeks.
The state of Florida is pushing the limits of absurdity with a new Bill that would give the governor the authority to remove local officials who take down Confederate monuments. As I’ve said before, if you need laws protecting public monuments from a democratic process that might result in removal, the problem is with the monuments and not the people.
I wonder what they will find after cleaning up other rivers in the former Confederacy?
Hundreds of Civil War relics were unearthed during the cleanup of a South Carolina river where Union troops dumped Confederate military equipment to deliver a demoralizing blow for rebel forces in the birthplace of the secessionist movement.
The artifacts were discovered while crews removed tar-like material from the Congaree River and bring new tangible evidence of Union Gen. William T. Sherman's ruthless Southern campaign toward the end of the Civil War. The remains are expected to find a safer home at the South Carolina Confederate Relic Room and Military Museum in the state capital of Columbia.
New to the Civil War Memory Library
Edward L. Ayers, American Visions: The United States, 1800-1860 (W.W. Norton & Company, 2023).
Grace Elizabeth Hale, In the Pines: A Lynching, A Lie, A Reckoning (Little, Brown, & Company, 2023).
Catherine McNeur, Mischievous Creatures: The Forgotten Sisters Who Transformed Early American Science (Basic Books, 2023).
Todd Mildfelt and David D. Schafer, Abolitionist of the Most Dangerous Kind: James Montgomery and His War On Slavery (University of Oklahoma Press, 2023).
John Reeves, Soldier of Destiny: Slavery, Secession and the Redemption of Ulysses S. Grant (Pegasus Books, 2023).
Videos
Here is historian Yael Sternhell discussing her brand new book, War on Record: The Archive and the Afterlife of the Civil War. I just finished reading it yesterday and I can’t recommend it enough. You will never look at the Official Records of the War of the Rebellion the same way again.
I am thrilled that The Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College is going to livestream the annual Fortenbraugh Lecture, which is scheduled for tomorrow evening. This year will feature a panel discussion on the state of Civil War military history with historians Jennifer Murray, Craig Symonds, and Lorien Foote. Looking forward to it.
Here is another in the American Battlefield Trusts “Civil War Then & Now” series. This one focuses on the ground where Lincoln delivered his “Gettysburg Address.”
Otis
As you can see, Otis is doing well and very much enjoying the falling leaves. Have a great weekend, everyone.
